If your broadband isnt at the "upto" speeds

The current legislation encourages ISP's to over sell and under invest in thier products. The internet is now a utility just like water, gas and electricity. The legislation should be changed to reflect this and encourage the ISP's to behave properly as utility providers.

If your broadband was "10Mb/s guaranteed" and and you got 30 Mb/s you would be much more inclined to enthuse about the ISP.

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

ISPs do sell 5Mbps with 99.999 uptime, but you would not want to pay the price.

Voltage analogy, UK is nominally 230V RMS, to make it closer to the Europe 220V, but many still measure at 240V or sometimes higher, reducing life of some devices.

The minimum service level for consumer broadband is around the 25Kbps to 100Kbps mark, i.e. what they budget for in the bandwidth allocation, and this is impossible to guarantee due to the wide number of things that can affect it. The services with guarantees often use expensive managed hardware to allow for the tracking of uptime for SLA etc.

How does the guarantee cope with the variations in telephone line length, vagueries in how people configure computers, slow wireless links.

Also one service that guarantees 50Kbps compared to another with the same guarantee may perform very differently at peak times.

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

It's not good business sense to give you more than you've paid for is it?

I've never really understood this upto argument, I really can't see how else BB would or could be sold as a lot of it is down to the distance from the exchange and line quality, what I think people forget about in this digital age is that the old PSTN lines are effectively analogue lines, aren't they?

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

You seem not to understand the nature of broadband. To put it in simple terms, the "signal" weakens as it travels along a phone line, the longer the line. the lower your speed, this isn't due to ISP overselling, its a technical fact. The aims in the petition are unachievable in terms of providing a mass market broadband, although you may be able to get guaranteed speeds (quite low ones) if you are prepared to pay high costs for a leased line. The ADSL customers of an ISP will get varying speeds depending on their distance from the exchange - anything from sub 1 up to whatever the exchange is capable of - mine will only do 8Mbps. Im not saying that over-contention doesn't occur from time to time, but the wording of the petition over simplifies the problem, the majority of people have low speeds due to line length, line condition or indeed the funky wiring within their property, coupled in many cases with an under investment by the wholesaler in upgraded exchange equipment.

I'm on an Upto 8Mbps service, it performs in line with the expectations for my line stats, I get around 5.5Mbps, being a couple of miles from the exchange I cant expect more. Many people would benefit from taking the time to learn about the simple steps that can be taken to ensure that their line is performing at its best.

A better idea would be to outlaw the use of headline speeds, and force BTw to provide a realistic estimate of line capability in the checker rather than the ridiculous 1.5 to 5.5 meg guesstimate I saw on a friends line when he moved recently.

Just My Opinion.... YMMV

Any ISP that thinks that selling my click traffic is acceptable is MisinPHORMed
Market 1 (IPSC) - a BT group investment NOT Spot

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

Thanks for pointing out the typo's - I'm too reliant on spell checkers.

I'm pretty sure if your gas supplier only gave you 50% gas pressure at prime time, and then the methane was mixed with nitrogen so that it barely held a flame you would complain. If this was because they only brought enough gas to cover the mean daily usage, there would be scandal.

This is what the ISP's are currently doing. Thier "upto" claims allow them to over subscribe thier infrastructure massively on the assumption that most users will never reach this limit. The trouble is, this is now at the point that at prime time many ISP's infrastructure in congested areas cant cope.

Currently ISP's work out the max possible bandwdith, then assume that the users will use less than 5% of it.

If however, they guaranteed a minimum level of service, then they would have to prove that for X users at Y bandwidth they must have Z bandwidth.

If the internet is truley to be a utility legislation must change to allow you the user a minimum SLA.

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

Actually at peak times in the winter there can be a lowering of gas pressure, and in some US cities brown-outs from too many air conditioners are not uncommon.

Also the way we pay for gas is different, its per unit used, if broadband were the same then ISP's would encourage us to use as much as possible.

Also remember even business SLA's generally only cover traffic from one location to another specific one and are based on technologies that do not suffer signal degradation over a few km of phone cable.

Up to is a bit of a cloudy description, but a guarantee of say 100Kbps, would make most people believe that YouTube would never work for example, when in reality even with current products it does for the vast majority of customers.

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

If the internet is truly to be a utility legislation must change to allow you the user a minimum SLA.

If a Minimum Speed SLA was set what do you think exactly would happen? - I predict it would likely end in vast areas being deemed "not suitable for broadband order" and simply wont allow you to sign up (like the early days) - you would certainly not see ISPs or BT try to improve the line, this is simply physics. A long line is a long line and no amount of rerouting or copper improvements can improve what spec an ADSL product can and can not work along and to what speed. (ignoring technological / product changes)

So your campaign could in fact hobble more people than it helps.

If however you were to focus instead on peak time throughput that would be a different matter. But personally I don't see any need to change the "Upto" arrangement as providing the buyer has a little knowledge and is realistic the system does work IMO.

Re: If your braodband isnt at the "upto" sppeds

I think it would be a good thing to advertise the broadband by a minimum guaranteed speed. Its how they do it in Portugal and it seems to work well there. I can only speak from my own experience but it didn't seem like rural areas suffered from this sales model. I was still able to get broadband up in the mountains.